Have you been salivating over prospects of eating your first vine-ripened tomato around the Fourth of July after a nine-month famine from juicy tomatoes? When it happens, most gardeners memorialize the event. Mindful that the first tomato has ripened on the vine, you high-tail it back to the kitchen, fetch a salt shaker, and return to the garden to capture the first tomato of the season. Your first bite into the succulent fruit, a sprinkling of salt, and both of us know what heavenly food has been bestowed on us.

Which Plants To Grow

If we picked tomato plants like we pick filet mignon at the supermarket, how much better off we would be! Not every tomato plant is a good candidate for your backyard garden. Some plants at the nursery come across like senior citizens. Set them in the garden and they go to sleep. On the other hand, those tiny plants people seldom buy make perfect candidates. Set them in the garden and, right away, they’re off growing like rockets. Which plant would you buy?

Of course, size has something to do with the summer-fall harvest, but so does the hybrid nature of the plant. There are determinate tomato plants and indeterminate tomato plants. You need a few determinate plants and lots of indeterminate ones. Why?

Determinate plants fruit early, which is a godsend. They grow to about three feet tall, they never need staking, then they fruit like crazy. These are the first tomatoes you will eat, so you owe it to yourself to plant a few of the determinate plants. Some names to ponder: Bush Beefsteak, Bush Early Girl, Celebrity, Daybreak, Early Cascade, Early Wonder, Fourth of July, Miracle Sweet, Oregon Spring (contains no seeds), Pilgrim, Red Sun, Springset, Spring Giant, and Super Chief.

Indeterminate plants keep the fridge bulging with tomatoes from early August to the first autumn frost. Plants grow tall (say five-to-six feet), most gardeners stake them one way or another, and they yield fabulous tomatoes. Imagine one thick slice of a beefsteak tomato between two slices of rye bed, and smothered with Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Nothing comes as close to heaven on earth as this succulent sandwich.

Some names to ponder: Ace Improved, Beefsteak, Better Boy, Big Beef, Big Boy, Brandywine, Campbell 1327, Champion, Dona, Early Girl, Fantastic, First Prize, Heinz 1350, Jetsetter, Jet Star, Sunbeam, Sunmaster, Super Fantastic, Supersonic, Terrific, Tropic, Ultra Boy, Ultra Girl, Ultra Sweet and Ultrasonic.

For decades, the preferred tomato plants were Marglobe, Marglobe Improved, Marglobe Select, Rutgers and Rutgers Select, but they seem to have disappeared from seed and plant catalogs. Perchance you should run across any of these tomato plants, don’t ask questions, just buy them and plant a few when you get home.

When you bring tomato plants home, set them in a spot with morning sun and afternoon shade. If you plant the next morning, so much the better. If not, water the plants every morning until you plant.

Tomato Planting

First, a warning: if you grew tomatoes in the past, and the plants died from the ground up over the summer, do not plant tomatoes in the same area. That soil has been infected with the disease spores of fusarium wilt, and setting plants there will merely repeat the problem. Your only answer is to plant tomatoes elsewhere or in containers so plant roots are not exposed to the disease. Even growing tomatoes in a “raised bed” is usually enough to avoid the problem.

Some East Coast gardeners will be testing a new product this spring and summer (actually a fertilizer) to see if the product stops fusarium wilt from getting to non-VF tomato plants grown in contaminated soil. We will keep you posted on developments by mid-summer.

How do you grow tomatoes? If you usually stake your plants, space them three to four feet apart down the row. If you grow plants in cages, space them five feet apart. If you let plants ramble on their own, grow them two feet apart and no more. Crowding like this won’t reduce the harvest one bit!

Water plants when you bring them home. If you are not planting right away, store them in a protected place where they won’t be buffeted by winds. Full sun is the best location. Water them in the morning as long as they have yet to be planted.

Soak the garden briefly the night before planting to simplify digging the next morning.

The size of holes isn’t important, but there’s no reason to dig a big hole for a small plant. Usually, holes should be less than a foot deep. Save soil taken up from the hole.

Now, scatter a handful of ground limestone at the base of the hole, followed by a handful of sharp sand for drainage. Set your tomato plant in the hole to gauge how much to backfill at the bottom. In backfilling, use trowels of composted cow manure mixed with good quality peat humus. Set the plant in the hole. On opposite sides of the plant, apply one teaspoon of ground limestone, and backfill with composted cow manure and peat humus. Add water to settle the soil remove air pockets. Now, backfill to the top with soil originally taken up from the hole, then sprinkle another teaspoon of ground limestone on top of the soil. Sprinkle more water. No need to mulch the soil just yet.

Every morning for a week or so after planting, use a sprinkling can to water the plants. Don’t flood the soil with volumes of water, just enough to moisten the soil at the root zone.

Two weeks after planting, scatter a half-teaspoon of cornmeal to surround the stem of each tomato plant to thwart cutworms. If cutworms emerge from the soil to feast on the stems of tomato plants, they will first feed on the cornmeal. Since they can’t digest cornmeal, they die instead of killing the tomato plant.

Expect aphids and leaf-feeding insects within a few weeks after planting. Use the “rose duster” filled with kitchen flour to stop insects. In the early morning when plants are wet with dew, dust the flour liberally on every plant. The flour traps bugs so they can’t move, can’t eat, and they die. Don’t irrigate plants with overhead watering. Rains will wash kitchen flour from your plants, so follow up the next morning with another dusting of kitchen flour.

Every month after planting, energize tomato plants. Into a large plastic bucket, pour a gallon of water, then stir in a heaping garden shovel of composted cow manure. Stirring often to keep the manure in suspension, scatter a quart of the solution over the soil of each tomato plant; don’t sprinkle manure over the plant itself. “Manure tea” is all you need to grow non-stop tomatoes.

Every month, scatter a handful of ground limestone atop the soil around each tomato plant so roots have uninterrupted access to calcium. It’s the calcium in the hole at planting and monthly applications afterward that prevent tomatoes from having ugly black blotches on the bottom of the fruits (so-called “blossom end rot”). Keep records when you lime the soil and apply manure tea so you know when to do it the next time (every month).

Other cultural pointers:

* Staked plants inevitably reduce the harvest (if God wanted us to stake tomato plants, He would have seen to it that tomato plants had hooks). You can increase the harvest of staked plants by other devious means. Keep checking the base of the plant for the first “sucker” happening at a 45-degree angle between the main trunk and the lowest branch (shoot). Don’t remove this sucker for any reason. When this sucker lengthens to about six inches, come along and prune (yes, prune) the branch below. As a result, the sucker is no longer a sucker, but a second vertical stem which will increase your tomato harvest by upwards of 15 precent. However, all other suckers growing on your staked plant should be pinched away as they develop. Suckers on rambling and caged plants are not a problem.

* A week or two after setting out tomato plants, mulch the soil down the rows to prevent weeds. Your best mulch is “salt hay,” alias marsh grass. Grown in salt water wetlands, salt hay contains no weeds. Aside from the nation’s capital, salt hay is only available at nurseries along the Hudson Valley of New York State, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Salt hay is cultivated in wetlands off Cape Cod Bay, so the hay is available in these areas. Call your nursery to find out if they have salt hay.

Bring black plastic trash can liners and a wire cutter when you shop so you can store salt hay for the garden. Pulled apart, salt hay should be applied thinly over the soil in the next two weeks, and wet down. After Halloween, salt hay will be raked from the garden, sun-dried on the driveway, and stored in trash can liners to be used for the next five years before it decays. If you don’t use salt hay, brace yourself for oceans of weeds.